More Progress Toward Providence
We’re very excited to announce that Providence will support Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and GeoNames! Through our efforts to build a highly configurable cataloging tool we understand the important role controlled vocabularies and authority lists play in creating a functional, interoperable, and sustainable system. While CollectiveAccess has always supported authorities lists, these often had to be constructed in-house or licensed from expensive services. Now CA can utilize Library of Congress’ freely available subject headings for intellectual access control, and GeoNames for place name consistency.
- LCSH - Do these really need an explanation? Library of Congress Subject Headings were established and are maintained by the Library of Congress in the United States. They are used by libraries, archives, museums and other information collections to organize and access the intellectual content of their assets. They help to describe the aboutness of things, and link things together that share the same aboutness. LCSH in CA works as a subject authority lookup that takes search text, passes it through the LCSH web-service (http://id.loc.gov) and returns a dropdown with search results. A selected subject heading is stored as text, ID, and its URL.
- GeoNames - This is a open source and free solution to other expensive licensed geographic databases. It contains over 8 million geographic names! Available under the creative common attribution license, GeoNames in CA functions as a geographic lookup that takes search text, passes it to the GeoNames search service and provides a dropdown with search results (ordered by score). The selected geoname is stored as both text (name, country, continent and ID) and the service URL identifier.
LCSH and GeoNames will be included in the “out-of-the-box” Installation Profiles for Standards like DublinCore (done!) and MARC (in development). They can also be easily added at anytime.
Authority control is awesome and important, so it’s really satisfying to be able to offer these new features as we drive toward the party in Providence!